George Saunders on Writing and Transformation

We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their

good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is George Saunders, the author of nine books, including Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the inaugural Folio Prize for the Best Work of Fiction in English. He was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and teaches

in the Creative Writing program at Syracuse University. Today, George and Eric discussed his book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, in which four Russians give a master class on writing, reading, and life. Hi, George, welcome to the show. Nice to be here, Eric, Thanks for having me. It is a real pleasure to have you on. I'm such a big fan of your writing, and we'll be talking about your latest book, which is called A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, in which four Russians

give a master class on writing, reading, and life. But before we do that, we'll start the way we always do, with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there's two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One's a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed

and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it, and he looks up at his grandfather says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah, that's a beautiful one. You know. I'm just reading this book called Live Wired about the brain, and it literally proves the truth of

that parable. It says that whatever you do with your body and your mind during the day, the brain then remakes itself to honor those things or to enable those things. So, you know, I have some experience with different meditation practice, and I think what you're doing there is you're sort of artificially summoning up a positive state of mind, and then I think the brain takes the cue from that and then it reforms itself, and then that state becomes

more easy for you to attain. And every moment the mind is asking you what you want it to do, and if you say, ah, you know, let's neurotically obsess about all the ways in which we've been short changed in life, and then the mind is happy to do that. And then I think the idea is it makes a kind of rut in which it can do that more easily, and pretty soon you're that person. Whereas if you just slightly can enforce a change in the habit to where in a quiet moment your mind might turn to gratitude.

Then I think theoretically that rut will be dug and you'll be a more grateful person. I think that's what that parable means to me. Anyway, We're not powerless to decide what kind of person will become. I love that we're not powerless to decide what kind of person we

will become. There's so many different places I could take this conversation with all your different writings, with the latest book, with your interest in Buddhism, But I want to start with the line fairly early in the new book, and you're describing what these Russian writers are doing, and you say that they have the most radical idea of all, that every human being is worthy of attention, and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the

universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble person and the turnings of his or her mind. Say a little more about that, Yeah, I mean, I think that's kind of the basis of fiction, which is that if you want to know the great truths of the world, you have two choices. One is to try to sort of conceptually generalize to them, which I don't think is very successful because our mind is actually kind

of small compared to the universe. The second route is a more homely route, which is just say, well, whatever is going on in this planet, it's first starts in a single mind, any single mind, any mind is as good as any other. And then we have this ability to imaginatively focus on that person. We're going to try to imagine what they're imagining, and in that, you know,

we're making a little scale model the whole thing. If we look at a guy sitting at a diner counter looking over at the pie his friend is having with envy, that's envy, you know, that's the whole history of human questing, you know. Or if we look at someone and we're in his mind the first time he sees this person he's going to fall in love with, that tells us

so much about love. So for me, one of the reasons I'm attracted to fiction as a vocation is that, in this very small way that's accessible to all of us, actually we all imagine, we all project, we can work through some things in terms of questions like well, why is it that we all want to be happy, but we tend to make each other miserable sometimes. Or how is it that even though in a given moment a person would never or almost never choose to be evil,

we still do things that add up to evil. I would say all those answers are just available in the tiny, little fluctuations of one's own mind, and those are actually what we're using when we make a story. We're just pretending that this guy over here is a different person from us, But of course we're exporting all of our own thoughts and desires and stuff into that imaginary vessel. Yeah, that's so true. The other thing you say at one point in the book, I think you're talking about a

Chekhov story and you say something that I love. You're talking about how the more we get to know this character, the less inclined we are to pass judgment on that person. You say, some essential mercy in me has been switched on. And then I love this line you say, what God has going for him that we don't is infinite information. That's just so cool. This idea that if we take the idea of God, as you know, loving all of us, the reason that God is capable of doing that is,

he can see all of us. Yeah. God is kind of a master of cause and effects. So in other words, you know, you're walking down the sidewalk and somebody roughly bumps into you. Instantly, I know that person's political party, I know certain things about his mind. Of course I don't really, And I think there's this idea that if you could follow that person home, and if you could even leap into his mind and see some famous poets

that his secret fears. I think what happens is as you fill up with information like that, the causality that led him to be the person he is becomes clear. You know. It's kind of like when you have a fight with your partner. Before you have a talk about it, you have an idea in your mind of what happened. Then she explains it to you and suddenly you go, Okay, So my initial model wasn't quite right, and actually from

her point of view, it makes sense. And the more information you exchange, the more you see that, of course it happened the way it happened. You know, how otherwise could it have happened, given the entire history of the universe up to that point. So with fiction, we get this rare opportunity to sort of slow time down for one thing, to sort of play at the skill of omniscians.

So Chekhov, for example, we'll go into the character's head and stay there for nine pages, really beautifully and convincingly, with a high degree of specificity. So we get to do on the page what we never get to do in life, which is fully fully know somebody. I think when we fully know somebody, it's not that we don't have opinions about them, but the opinions are kind of

full of this. On the other hand, thinking, you know, when we want to make a two facile judgment, some fact comes along goes well, you know, you have to also consider this. And so from my point of view that this makes us wiser, you know, maybe a little slower to act, which is probably a good thing in most cases. It makes every decision more fraud because we

know more. So to me, it's it's something we can simulate on the page, and I would claim that it's just good for us to go through that exercise, almost like sacramentally. I've always been really interested in this. There's a cognitive bias out there. It goes by a couple of different names, but one of the ones that's known by is the fundamental attribution error, and it's one of my favorite ones because it basically says, when I do

something bad, I know all the circumstances. Well, I didn't get enough sleep and Jenny's mom had a psychotic episode this morning with her Alzheimer's. I know all the reasons why I acted like a jerk. But when you do it, it's because you're a jerk, you know. And I love cognitive distortions because and you talk a lot about this,

and we'll get to it in a minute. We don't see the world correctly, but it's really hard to know in what ways am I not seeing the world correctly, And so I've always found cognitive distortions interesting because they allow me to sort of identify some of those ways that I don't see the world correctly. And the fundamental attribution error is a really common one and one that if we can start to not do, is so powerful, especially when you see that one's attribution error tends to

have a pattern, you know. So in other words, when someone does something we don't know why, will supply reasons, and those reasons surprise surprise will tend to reaffirm our existing view of the world. So if I have an idea about the way things are, someone offends me, they are given reasons by me, which in a sense takes you even a step further from whatever the truth is. That's one of the things that I wanted to talk about. You bring this up in a lot of different places.

You bring it up in this book, you bring it up in your talk on kindness that you did that's so lovely, But you basically talk about the sort of very built in Darwinian confusions that we have. Can you share a little bit more about what those are? What that is that you're talking about. Sure, it's basically the sense of self that we have from the minute we're born, and that I think, in my case anyway, I tend to have built it up more and more with every

passing year. You know, on one level, we know that that is an illusion because if nothing else, we see that this person doesn't last very long. You know, pretty soon they're gone. But I think you know, what neuroscientists are working toward is kind of the same thing that Buddhists have known for a long time, which is that the self doesn't actually physically exist anywhere. It's kind of a process. I mean, you know, you could say it's an illusion or a delusion that is constructed, and I

suspect it's done because the species wanted to survive. So if I believe that I'm primary in this world and I'm so important and I'm George, you know, I'm constantly telling myself my own dramatic, lovely victory narrative. You know, then when the wolf comes to eat me, I'll resist a little harder. You know. That makes sense, and it's beautiful. Actually it's no problem. But the problem is it's also

not true. So we all, you know, at different times in our lives, and certainly at the end of our lives, we run into the toll taker for this lifetime of living within a delusion, which is that you know, Oh, by the way, George, it's the day of your death, and this guy that you've held dear for so long is not going to be with us. And by the way, I can't really tell you where he's going. Oh well, you know, so I think that's really the essence of it,

and it's not horrible. I mean, I think in a way, these things comprise a kind of owner's manual for the mind that we have. But most of us, I think, are so thoroughly seduced and charmed by the illusion of self that we don't, you know, often step outside of It's very hard. I mean, the ego is so bright and so adaptable, and it doesn't really, I think, in a certain way, doesn't really want us asking those questions.

So that's what I mean. And again, I don't really despair of it, but I think as I get older, I'm a little more tired of it. I'm tired of being trapped within what I know is kind of an elaborate magic trick. Yeah, And I love the way that you describe it, because I've talked to fair amount on this show about some of these ideas of on self, and they're sort of abstract short of experience, they don't necessarily make a lot of sense. But you say a

description here that I really like. You say, the mind takes a vast, unitary wholeness. The universe selects one tiny segment of it me and starts narrating from that point of view, and just like that, that entity, George becomes real and he is surprise, surprise, located at the exact center of the universe, and everything is happening in his movie. And I love that idea that that center of the universe piece. I think it is so much because we

all think we are. It's the point of reference. And we'll get to some of these points a little bit later, particularly hopefully if we get to the Tolstoy story Master and Man. But it's not that that view is necessarily wrong, because there's a certain rightness to it. It's just that

it's a very very limited view. It's a perspective that's very small, right, right, I've heard it this right onces that a lot of these apparent conundrums can be addressed by thinking in terms of the relative and the absolute. So in a relative sense, I definitely exist, which I know if I stub my toe you know where I get a nice review, you know very much exists. But rationally we can see that, yeah, you know, you flared

into existence. You're never the same moment to moment, and in time something will take you out, and that consciousness will we don't know, but you know, certainly the consciousness that we've known all these years will not be there anymore. So the thing is both are true. You hear sometimes people say, oh, myself doesn't exist, and so therefore it doesn't matter if I steal your cookie or you know whatever.

But that's not really fair. Both things are true. So that's the conundrum, is to try to figure out how to live and enjoy and you know, be fruitful in this life, while at the same time knowing that a lot of the motivations that make you want to do that are actually just contrivances, Darwinian contrivances really right, right, We are driven very much on some level by survival mechanism. Yeah, you know, as a former Catholic, part of me, once I've said that, you know, we're a contrivance, I get

a little dour. But then another part of me says, yeah, but that's how we are, you know, but we're we were given hunger, we were given lust, we were given the desire to go to the carnival. Why would you refute those things? They're there for you to enjoy. I

think the trick is for me at sixty two. You know, I'm a writer, so I I could go to spring training, you know, with the White Sox and follow those guys around and listen to them talk and I could write a piece that would really be full of pithy information about baseball, but I still couldn't hit the ball, you know, no matter how much I can talk about the physics stuff and I can talk about how one gets better, but I'm still not going to be a very good hitter.

This is also the case for me with the spiritual stuff, is I can lay out a pretty good system intellectually, but that's sort of neither here nor there. What's important is to get that knowledge into your body somehow, and uh, that is I suspect the work of many lifetimes, and so at this moment in my life, I'm kind of hurched on that, like, well, you know, you're not you have some number of years left. You know very well what a big job it would be to actually get

your ego to reduce. But in fact, what you're doing is sort of gradually making it bigger, you know, by by doing this writing thing and kind of trotting after that. So it's, you know, kind of a crossroads moment, but it's a moment I've been at for the last twenty years, so it's not that urgent or scary. That brings up a really interesting point, and I have talked about this

a little bit. Over the last several years, I had several pretty really powerful, mystical type experiences that, you know, we would say that is part of what we're aiming for in spiritual practice, the actual realization that the self that I am spending all this time protecting just isn't worth protecting in the way that I'm trying to protect it. And these very very powerful moments. I've described it as

feelings sometimes stuck in the middle. And what I mean by that is I've had powerful enough experiences and enough time that I go, well, that stuff isn't really that important, and my level of ego, if we think of it as how am I perceived in the world, diminished greatly, but it didn't diminish all the way. And so what I find is that a lot of the ambition what used to drive a lot of my activity in the world, it was reduced, but it wasn't reduced enough that I

didn't care at all. And so I sometimes describe it as stuck in the middle. You know, I don't have the previous ambition fuel I once had, but not to the point where I don't care at all. I don't know if that relates at all to what you were just kind of saying. These questions are way above my pagrade. But I'll tell you what it's occurred to me is just speaking for myself. I don't think I do myself

any favors by trying to diminish those ambitious energies. For me, that's not quite right, because then you can get into kind of a new age ascetic thing where you just I don't care about anything, but you kind of do, and you kind of should. You know, I don't think I mean to be weird if someone said I I don't do hunger anymore, man, I'm against hunger. Bullshit, You aren't.

You know, you're pretending. So I think for me that the trick is somehow again it's beyond me, but it must have something to do with one's relation to those ambitious energies. How are you fielding them and how are you submitting to them? Like after I write a story and it gets accepted, for example, there's a really important moment there where I either kind of lean into it in this kind of victory dance feeling which realifies the self.

You know, I'm winning, I'm winning after all. Or there's another move, which is to kind of I always think of it sort of tossing it in a backpack, like yep, okay, that's good, but then re calibrating myself to recognize that the real moment of pleasure and power is back when I did it. You know, being in the middle of the creative process was a more reliable place to be as opposed to, you know, standing under the goal post dancing. But all of these things, I mean, there's such interesting

questions and I certainly don't know. But the sense I get is that, you know, it would be simple to completely lean into being ambitious and be Gordon Gecko. It would be simple to completely renounce all worldly ambition. I think both of those are autopilot in a way. For me, it feels like anyway, there's some middle ground there, as you say, where you're celebrating both. You know, you're celebrating

the whole shebang. I haven't been there, but maybe for a couple of minutes a day, I'm in the right place. You know. It's a big question to me, there's something not quite right about denying one's essential energy, because then how are you going to do anything? I talked to my students about this. You know that a lot of them have a lot of mixed feelings about their very palpable desire for fame, And I'm like, well, if it's palpable, it's real. So you could certainly do the Catholic thing

of suppressing it, putting your foot on his throat. But I think there's a more mature thing to do, which is to sort of affably accept that that's in your toolbox and you've got to figure out how to use that energy. Yeah, and that's a perfect transition, I think into the Tolstoy story that for me was incredible story, but the way you broke it own, I was like, can I just have George come, like, can we read

War and Peace together? You and me and you can just kind of break down every chapter a little bit, because it really brought some things together for me that we're really powerful. Can you give a brief summary of

the story about giving too much away? Yeah? I mean, to me, it's a cousin to a Christmas Carol, which is a story that you know says, Okay, once upon a time there was a really miserable human being that we're going to use as a stand in for evil, and then we're gonna go on a little adventure with this person. And the question hanging over the story is can such a person change? You know? And then the secondary question is if so, how, And you know, that's

a story that is fun on two levels. One, it's kind of fun to see a jerk in the world's it's a fun to see a jerk depicted. But also I think the story is at a deeper level speaking to everybody because we all, as we just were, should be thinking about the question of how can I change? You know, how can I who don't consider myself an evil person, but I'm a limited person? How can I change? And if I did, what would that actually look like?

So that's kind of the understory. The story itself is so beautifully specific and real and this role they go on a trip to a blizzard and larity ensues. Yeah, so what blows me away about this story? We can actually kind of skip by too much of the parts of the story. But I want to bring up a couple of things that you bring up here because I am very, very interested in how people change. That's probably the heart of what three episodes of this show is about.

How do people change. I'm a former heroin addict, so I have undergone dramatic change in my life. I do a lot of one on one coaching work with people, will create workshops. So I'm very interested in how people change. And this story is very much about can this person change? And if so, how does it happen? And you say that what creates the illusion of a changed mind? Here is a simple pattern. What once worked for Vassili stops working? Did I pronounce his name rights at the correct pronunciation?

I think there's a I don't know, I've I've pronounced it four or five different ways along the pass In class, we just call these guys about their first name, just for simplicity, V, V and N. Yeah, that would be a good way to do it. I'm always mispronouncing things. Complete aside here, but a lifetime of reading, particularly when I was young, got me to the point where I knew all sorts of words, and I knew what they meant,

but I'd never heard a human being say them. Yeah, I would go to use it for the very first time and I'd be like, I don't even know if that's right. Yeah, that's a sign of somebody who's read ahead of their life, which is really nice. So V in this case you describe. The first pattern here is that what works for him stops working, And I think

this is so fundamental to human change. Yeah, there's a section where he's sort of trying to wait out this freezing cold night, and the person who so far has never had any fear or self doubt suddenly gets some Actually harder to de pick than you might think, because if you've made a person who's convincingly arrogant and confident,

you know you can't just reform him instantaneously. So here, what Tuls he does is just he establishes certain thought patterns that Vacility has, which we all do that kind of mental recounting of our various victories. You know, I'm such a good writer, I won this award, blah blah blah. Later he marks the sort of interimment where Vacili falls asleep and we all know that feeling of falling asleep in the cold, and then you wake up even colder and and sort of like, oh god, I'm still here.

And then vacillly revisits those same exact thought patterns, but now suddenly they're not giving him any sustenance. There's just something so skillful about that, and it kind of ties into what happens at the end, which is, you know, change never means that you step entirely out of who you are and take on a different mind and body.

It's something more interesting going on, which is that all your previous habits just get slightly re channeled somehow, you know, As I say in the essay, it's a very hopeful thing because I've never had a moment where I stopped being me and it's wearisome, you know. So that might make us think, Okay, I'm stuck, I'm stuck forever in this guy. But what touls Away saying is no, no, no, You're actually an amalgam of different energies and impulses, almost

like those what Pachinko games or whatever. You know, the marble comes down if it goes left instead of right, it's still using its same energy. So this is what the lesson of this story is is he's not going to suddenly become a perfect person who has no resemblance to who he was before, but a lot of his habits can just move over a half inch, and in that way, he's completely transformed by the end. Yeah, it makes me think so much of a concept and behavior

science of the habit loop. I don't know if you're familiar with the habit loop, but the habit loop basically says, right, you've got a stimulus or a trigger, You've got then the thing that you do, and then there's a reward on the other end. So if your thing is smoking, you know, you get a trigger. I'm stressed, you smoke, you feel a little bit better. And the simplest thing

to do is you just change that middle part. You can't change the fact that you're going to get stressed, and he also can't change the fact that you're gonna want relief from that stress. So recognizing those things are going to remain the same, you try and change that middle element. And that's kind of what you're pointing to here, and that the character in this story doesn't suddenly change his essential energy. His essential energy is an energy of doing.

He is a doer. He also thrives on the feeling of self pride, you know, a victory. And the funny thing is even and I won't give story way, but even at the end, he's doing, he's still doing, taking a lot of pleasure in that work energy. And he's still congratulating himself. You know, he's congratulating himself though for something different. And before when he congratulated himself, he was doing it for being a rich guy, a clever guy, you know, better than everyone else. Now he still thinks

he's better than everyone else. He's just really good at saving people. You know, he's really good at being selfless. You know, that is something very familiar to me, Like, you know, I wrote that talk on kindness and I went on tour for it, and so everyone is saying, oh, you're so kind, and of course I go, yeah, I am. I'm pretty cool. There's the ego, you know, so nobody

you know, can exactly get away from that. But in his case, he's still enacting the same patterns of wanting to be victorious and wanting to feel good about himself, but the objects of those things have just changed slightly. And of course in the story, one of the things that helps him get there is that, you know, he's

in extreme fear and he's an extremely dangerous situation. And that's like that thing, you know that the knowledge that wants to be hung in the morning has the fact of clarifying the mind or whatever the universe gives him a great gift, which is that he's in terrible peril. You know, right as you're sort of walking us through this. In the book, you tell a story about you being

on a plane. Can you share a little bit of that. Yeah, I mean this is quite a long time ago, but I was on a book tour and I was coming home on the last leg from Chicago to Syracuse, and make a long story short, some geese flew into one of the engines and knocked it out kind of catastrophically, and it was, I think, really dangerous because the crew stopped communicating with us and there was a lot of energy and terror in the air. So I just blanked out.

I mean I literally might not have been able to recall my name. You know. You hear people saying I was so scared I pissed myself, And I'm like, oh, yeah, that could happen. That's not just hyperboly, that actually could physically happen. Because suddenly you know you're you're a guy going home to see your family, and then you're not.

Suddenly you know all of that future is going to be over, and I remember looking at the seat back ahead of me and going, Okay, I'm gonna get out of this body now, and that's the thing that's going to do it to me and I can't help it, you know, I really can't help. But I have no

power here. So the reason I brought this up in this context was that, you know, after a few minutes of this, I noticed that there was actually a fourteen year old boy sitting next to me, and he looks over at me and he goes, uh, sir, is this supposed to be happening, And just his vulnerability. You know, I had kids about the same age at that time, and I just reflectively said, yeah, yeah, no, no no, it's fine,

it's fine, you know, which is totally not true. But I was just being a dad, you know, being a teacher. The interesting thing was, as soon as I did that, just totally out of habit, I a little bit came back to myself, like, Okay, this is not the best, but you still have some power, you know, you can still act. So I talked to him a little bit, and I noticed a woman across the aisle was nervous, and I took her hand, and I was still beyond terrified, but I had been reminded of the person I was

before this happened. So I think that's kind of what happens to the Silian. The story is through action, his habitual kind of manic, nervous, neurotic energy that he has, he rouses himself, you know who he is, and suddenly that energy is now channeled in a more positive directions. He's actually thinking of this peasant that's with him, and in the same way that I was thinking of that

little boy. You know. It's funny. It says that transformation is incremental, which in some ways is wonderful because it means that it actually does matter what you do. Small adjustments in mind and action actually do matter in the grandest scale possible. It's the only way that things could change. Yeah, there's two things in there I want to call in the book. You say, now my energy was going out towards him instead of inward neurotically, and that is such

a powerful idea. There's a quote by the writer Richard Roor. I love it. I won't get it right, but he says, basically, anything that is pulling you up and out of yourself is acting it for all intents and purposes as God for you in that moment, beautiful. I love that idea, anything that's pulling me up and out, And that ties in what we said earlier that that you, that self is actually a little bit rickety and delusional. So any chance we have to recognize that by moving away from

it as a plus, yep ye. And then that second piece that you said about changing incrementally being so important, This idea that we can change just a little bit at a time. I've reflected before on you know, if you're want to film the movie of my life, there would be this really dramatic scene at twenty four me

and arrested for a bunch of felonies. And there's another scene where I'm in a detox center and they say you need to go into longer term treatment and I say, no, I don't want to do that, and I go back to my room and I'm sitting there in the room and I have this, you know in in recovery called a moment of clarity where I'm like, oh God, I'm gonna die if I go back out there. And so I go back to him and I say, I'll go

into treatment. Right if we were filming the movie, that would be a big pivotal scene, right, But that scene is really no more important in my recovery then the thousands of other very small actions that I took hour after hour, day after day that kept moving me towards recovery. It's just that that one makes a great story, but they all matter, you know, back to that point of incremental change. A word I really love is granular. It

applies for fiction writing all the time. And in the story, you know, you said you you went into your room, and then you realize or you change your mind, you know, to extend the cinematic metaphor, if we could pan in on your mind at that moment, I would guess at many thousands of times before your mind had gone left in yeah, yeah, no, I don't need it. I don't need it. I don't need it. On this occasion it

went right, Maybe I do need it. That was prepared by many thousands of moments, you know, and uh and and then you know, even breaking down one level further, there's probably moments when your mind went right, okay, we better change and then the other part of the mind said no, no no, no, no, don't do that. Come back over here and it did that, So it really is a small, tiny, tiny little thing. And you know, in fiction, when you're rewriting a story, those are the kind of

things you're looking for. You always want to ask, how so, tell me more? And you know a moment that might have a kind of a big placard on saying transformation. If you keep saying, how so, tell me more, that the mind will cough up with increasing granularity, explanations and specificity, and then we get down to the core of how things actually happen. Dis relates to what we said earlier about the more you know about something, the less judgmental

you are. You know, right, somebody in that similar situation might feel like, oh, I don't have what it takes to make that decision, But your story tells us what you could, you know, depending on again, and to go back to your parable at the beginning. If enough times in your life you fed the right thing, even scraps of food, you know you might be preparing yourself for the one big decision where all the things are lined up in the ball goes into the Potico machine and

falls into the right direction. Yeah, I love that idea that you just brought up, that that decision was prefaced on countless previous decisions. I love the idea in Buddhism. Of Ian we talk about cause and effect, and we're like, okay, cause and effect. But I love that Buddhism essentially talks about countless cause and conditions that to me, gives a

really rich picture of reality. I think it also gives us positive intention because if your intention is right, then as those thousands of micro decisions come at you, you're more likely to feed them. Well, you know, if your ambition in the morning is I'm going to kick the world's ass, I'm gonna be so successful, then when those thousands of decisions come, they're a little confused by you,

you know. But if your intention is I really want to help other people, are want to be present, whatever formulation you have, and I think the best one is I'm going to try to be here for the benefit of other people, then when those decisions come, it's more likely that more of them are going to go in the positive direction. And then that's I think what they would call like you're you're kind of adding up merit. You know, over all, those thousands of micro decisions are

cumulatively changing the whole weather system inside your head. Yeah, I want to switch directions a little bit and talk about a method that you describe for how you work on a story, But I want to take something that you're doing in there and see if I can apply it more broadly. So you basically say that the process for you of getting through a piece of fiction is

you essentially write it and then you reread it. We won't use the word countless, but a lot of times over and over and over, and each time you're sort of looking at each sentence and you're sort of going, well, okay, did this move me in a positive or negative direction?

And you would work your way through. My question for you is how do you keep as much as possible approaching that work in a fresh way, Because I feel like if I reread something I've written, you know it's an email that's going to go out by about the third time, I feel like I'm barely even reading it.

So I think there's a process of being engaged. But the reason I ask taking this more broadly than than improving a work of fiction is that I think this ability to look get life freshly, to look at each moment freshly as much as possible with the beginner's mind is so important and so valuable, and so clearly it's something you really figured out how to do. So I'm kind of curious, how do you do it? Yeah, that's

a beautiful thought, and that connection is exactly right. I think the first thing you do is you recognize that freshness is hard to keep. You know, in others, you're absolutely right. By the third time you read something, the brain has done something that distances you from a genuine experience of it. So the one thing, in the practical sense as a writer, that's the thing that improves over time. For some reason, I can generate a simulation of a fresh mine much quicker now than I could when I

was thirty. I used to take me a couple of days. Now I can just sort of step away and get a couple of coffee and come back. And I wouldn't say it's really a fresh mind, but it's a simulation of a fresh mind. I can pretty much imagine the experience of a first time reader. Second of all, I have an ongoing like Q, A guy who's going, how's your freshness, you know, And I can say, yeah, today it's not so good, and he goes Okay, we'll be

humble then and don't change anything too much. Or some days you're like, wow, I am really seeing this as if I've never read before, and he goes, go use that, you know. So I think for me, that's most of it is just to be aware that there is such a thing as freshness and that we're not always in relation to and in possession of it. That's a lot of the struggle right there, because even in real life you can say, Man, I'm projecting like crazy today or

I'm really grouch. None of this seems fresh to me. But I think ultimately there are neurological slash spiritual ways to train ourselves to get fresh, you know, to have that beginner's mind, and also to be able to in real time assess how that's going. You know. I even have moments where I'm like, oh, wow, you're really in the throes of some pretty negative projections about so and so I'm sitting here looking at the person. I'm going, oh, yeah, look at that. Your mind is making up a backstory

about this person that isn't helpful. I don't really have a tidy answer, but I think that's exactly the right thing, and It's what I love about fiction is that it gives you a little practice space, you know, to come back to something fresh, and you know, there's a beautiful moment where you're reading something you've read seven or eight or twenty or thirty times, and suddenly you go, oh, wait a minute, there's a moment right here I missed.

You know, there's a little falseness here I didn't notice before, or there's a little rhythmic yuckiness that I didn't really hear before. And then the beautiful thing is when you poke at it, it often will give you something beautiful. So even just that as a lesson, you know, if if you're dissatisfied with something, if something seems not right, and you poke at it with positive intention, sometimes it

pops out something nice for you. You know. For me, it's it's something that you can kind of use in life a little bit. You know, if you're having a conversation with somebody and it just feels a little stifled, even just the admission that it feels stifled is sometimes a big step forward, you know, Whereas in my previous life, you know, I was a real denier. I somehow had learned early on that if I felt uncomfortable, I should

run away from that. And for me, that was often making a joke or doing a you know, kind of a bit of stand up or somehow I was uncomfortable with anything that was lumpy, and fiction has made me more comfortable with it. You know, you don't have to be afraid of that. You can sort of just you know, turn your attention to it. A couple of things you said there, if I were to summarize it for myself, would be one is practice, right, you keep doing it,

whether it's meditation or mindfulness. If we were to extrapolate this to a spiritual term, is to continue to practice. And then the second is I really like that idea of the internal que a guy going hey, am I fresh and sort of checking and it's interesting. I heard a different conversation between a couple of meditation teachers recently, and one of them was talking about he called it

the internal auditor. Was talking about being mindful looking out into the world, noticing something and then having an internal auditor sort of looking out into the world and saying I'm mindful of that tree, and the internal auditors saying, well, tell me a little bit about that tree. Are you really mindful? You know? And then the more you describe it a little bit, it goes okay, yeah, I guess okay, I'm going to give you a check on that one.

And I've found it to be a really interesting practice to sort of look at something and then ask myself, am I really seeing this thing? And then looking again. I've been exploring a little bit how artists look at the world as a way of being able to see what's out my window differently, right, because I know that at least what neuroscience says is I'm not even really seeing what's out there. And Buddhism said the same thing a long time ago. You're not seeing what's out your

window anymore. In the minute you named it all, you don't see it anymore. And neuroscience says that my brain is essentially predicting what it thinks is going to be out that window, and as long as the sense data coming back is more or less in accord with that, that sense data never even makes it all the way up the signal processing chain. And so some of the artists questions of where the edges, where the lights, where are the shadows? For me caused my brain to have

to look more freshly. And I think that's probably some of what's happening with you in fiction is you probably don't even know what they are at this point, but you've got ways of looking that allow you to go deeper. Yeah. I mean it's all language. You know. If you say, you know Fred the stupid Republican, and then you let that sitting and go ah, and you know that your specificity seeker says, well, okay, but how so tell me more? Uh, And what it's really saying is could you come up

with a more interesting formulation of that? Because that sentence is reductive and it's a little insulting. Then that's the equivalent of you looking out at those trees and saying, let me try to not think of that as a tree, but let me think of it as you know, what are the component phenomenon there. So as you try to in language rework Fred the Republican, you see that Fred has a scale model railroad in his basement. Huh, that's interesting.

And Fred is a widower, you know, And so suddenly the single reductive signifier Fred the Republican or tree can be sort of fragmented into smaller and smaller things and then you're coming closer to seeing Fred, you know. And and for me, it's all about language. It's all about just the process of that you described earlier, where you read a sentence and you just have to really get quiet and say, am I satisfied with that? Does that

sentence through me? And if not, where, and then just be sort of joyfully, kind of playfully making a little tweak to it. But you know, something you said made me think to one of the things I struggle with as a teacher, and I think it's similar in other parts of life. If I could generalize the Western mind, at least my Western mind thrives on analysis and conceptualization and in a sense, reduction. So we have pithy slogans

about writing. A given writer has a sense of his lineage and different maxims and different catch phrases and so on. But that's all thinking, you know. And people can spend their whole lives refining the way they think about writing. But what I try to say in the book is that's a very different process from the writing. The writing itself is accomplishing us what second from a direction we don't even understand, But getting better at that is what

actually will distinguish one writer from another one. And I think same with a lot of spiritual things, you know. I think Trunk, Bar Room Pretchet had a whole about spiritual materialism and how we can spend a whole life accumulating books and visits to different countries and all that, and then find that you wake up and you're not

that much different than you were at the beginning. So for me, that's, especially as I get older, that's a really urgent thing to remember that the accouterments of writing are fun and they very much seem like writing sometimes, but in fact they're not. You know, that's another discipline

I'm trying to enforce it myself. You've talked before about the similarities for you between writing and meditation, how they come together in certain ways, and listening to you talk now, it strikes me that one of them is there's a certain amount of patients that perhaps you developed through a lot of years of writing that as you entered meditation, prepared you to enter it with a certain frame of mind. And for me, what I have to do is make

sure it's an urgent patience. You know, there's that feeling, well, I'm just gonna hang out today and read my stuff. That's not it for me. You know, it's better when I've got a real sense of like a fire in the belly. And then the patience is, I'm going to have the fire in the belly today, I'm gonna make these great changes, and then I'm going to stop and be patient and come back tomorrow and do exactly the same thing again. So it's kind of a long term patience.

And when you say patients, what comes to my mind is a sense of saying, well, the story knows better than I do, so let me be an handmade into the story service energy which I don't know right now. I shouldn't know. I prefer not to know it. It's going to tell me what it's energy is, and then I'm gonna be there to help it. That's the kind of literary patients that I try to get to because there is some weird thing where you know, it sounds

crazy about a story. I would say, even from the first couple of sentences, and even if those sentences don't wind up in the final draft, a story has a kind of DNA, and your job is to try to discover that DNA. And the way you discover it is by trying to privilege the most high energy moments in the story as you stumble on them or as you revise them into being. So that's a lot different than what I thought when I was young, which is you just have to know some ship and force it on

the reader. It's much more exploratory and that's really exciting, you know, but it means that you never get to be a master. You get to be a schmuck, you know, and you you always have to be the person who shows up a little sheepishly going I have no idea what's going to happen, you know, Dear God, please help me listen well today and be playful. And I don't think it is meditation. I think meditation is much more

profound and can do more for us. But writing is sort of a nice cousin to that that maybe, as you're suggesting, it preps certain internal moves that will come in handy when you do the more eerious activity. Right. I'm interested to use the phrase you just use what are the cousins of meditation? You know, what are what are all the various cousins? Because I do think that meditation in the sense it's presented in a Buddhist context.

It's an incredibly powerful tool. I've done it for a long long time, and I think that it is only one tool, and for different people at different points in their lives, may not even be the best primary tool. I'm not certain. So I'm curious, like, what are its cousins? And I think writing is a good one. I think creativity is in general a good one. But I'm kind of curious of off the top of your head, do

you think of any other close cousins. What this book taught me is that everything is a causing nobit if you see it right. You know, falling down the stairs is a good one, you know, because you know, in writing this book, I kind of notice when we're reading a work of literature there's something that our mind does I think is general and what it is is okay, it's in a relatively uninflected state. So it's blank, you know,

you pick up the nine page store, you start reading. Instantly, the mind is being altered, you know, and it's being altered in a pattern of roughly speaking, you know, expectations are being engendered and then they're being exploited. I guess are used, you know, So you expect something. So when you're trying to analyze the story, in other words, when you're trying to understand what has happened to you, what are some gifts. Well, one is that internal auditor we

talked about. You look back over the story and you can remember where you were at each given point with some precision, or you know, in real time you asked, you could describe where you are when you're on page six. The second thing, which is maybe a little bit under praise, is just the willingness to bless that. You know, whatever your reaction is on page three, to go, yep, that's my reaction, I own it. You know. I'm not going to say I haven't read enough. I'm not going to

say I'm stupid. I'm not gonna say I don't know about the Russians. I'm probably wrong. I'm going to say, well, for better or worse, this is where my mind has been put. And that's what I have to work with. You know, that's what the artist has to work with, whereas he left me on page three. So blessing that, and then finally, once it's all done, your ability to

articulate what has happened to you. And that's really rich because the temptation, especially for someone like me who was a working class person and didn't have an early education, and like college in English, you're always inclined to give up your authority about your own reaction and seed it over to experts. So that's why you know, in class, a lot of times undergrads are trying to sound like

somebody else. They're denying their own reaction in favor of someone they've read somewhere, or an acceptable way of sounding intellectual. That's a form of denying, you know, your own reactions.

So what I've seen over the years of students is that it's a really exciting thing, starting with these Russian stories to help somebody learn to value and bless their own reactions, and then to try to articulate those just as they are without dressing them up, you know, trusting that if you have an experience and you describe to me as succinctly and accurately as you can, that is

by definition literary. You know, if one is read enough, you know, I say, so, that's really exciting and it and it broadens out to say, you know, any of us is an authority, and we are the watchers of our own minds, and when you go out into the world, and whether it's a yard party or a revolution, or a solar eclipse or a passionate love affair, the same process is in effect. You know, we're there, we have

a reaction, we bless it, we articulated. So I think this is one of the arguments that you don't hear much anymore. But why literature is a great thing for a young person to train herself in because it's everything, It's everything. Yeah, there's a spiritual teacher by the name of Addy Ashanti who was hugely important to me. I mean still is very important, but at a point so much.

And the thing that he said, I mean I've heard it a thousand times, right, But something about the way he said it finally drove at home, and it was trust your direct experience, not the direct experience that you think you should have. You know. So he's a lot into inquiry. Who am I ask yourself that? But then of course you know you're gonna want to answer that with the answers that you've read in books. You've got to trust your direct experience, you know, whatever that direct

experience is trusted. And then I love what you said and the way you you actually talk about doing in the book, notice that direct experience and then articulate it to the best of your ability. It's that real trusting process. Yes, you trust that thought, and I think part of the articulation is also to have a little correct skepticism about

your reaction. Now the words like when I was an engineering school, we're always taught that you do your experiment and part of your report is to reflect on the limitations of the experimental design, so you don't assert more than you should. So I think, you know, for me, part of the book was to say, here are my reactions. They're just my reactions, and also they might be awful little bit that little note of humility, because who's read enough,

you know, who knows everything? And every time you read a story you're in a particular state of mind and so on. So I think that that whole process, with a little touch of on the other hand at the end, you know, is really powerful. I think that's so true.

Maybe this would be the last point we'll touch on before we wrap up, because I wanted to ask you about that in a little bit more de tale, because you say, the writer goes through and you know you're revising your own work, or let's keep it with revising your own work for now. And you sort of read this sentence gives me a positive or negative and and you say that that writer's ability to trust themselves and

their voice is really really important. And I don't know if you brought it up in this book or if I heard you talking about in a different conversation, but talking about intuition. And I think intuition is a really interesting thing, and this idea of trusting ourselves as a really interesting thing because I've had different experiences in life, experiences now as a as a hopefully healthier, wiser person,

where I sort of trust my intuition. But I also know that there were plenty of times when I was twenty four where it was absolutely certain that going and getting a shot of heroin and stealing somebody's purse was absolutely the right thing to do. That was my intuition. So I'm so curious about in general, this idea of in intuition, how to know when and where to trust ourselves, knowing that, as you're pointing out on one hand, that voice, our internal voice, is the most important thing we have

as a writer. I'd argue it's one of the most important things we have as a human and as we've pointed out lots of different ways in this conversation, boy do we have a tendency to get it wrong? And I think you touched on it there for a second in your last response, But I'm wondering if you could say a little more. Yeah, Well, for me, you know, intuition might be it's definitely an approximate word. In terms

of writing. I always imagine that you've got a kind of cartoon bubble over your head when you're writing, that's telling you all kinds of things. In the worst case, it's giving you a big conceptual read out of your story, and it's over controlling it analytically that I can usually get rid of. Then you say, okay, is there anything up there? Still? Well, there is there, Always is, you know, unless you're some kind of amazing genius, there's always little

taints up there. I trust my intuition to the extent that rumination has stopped, and for me, rumination stops in fascination. So in other ways, it's the story that I'm right has pulled me into it by the fourth of a sentence and convinced me that it's actually happening. Rumination isn't the thing anymore, and my intuition is just located in the microscopic way on the phrase. The phrases that are

coming by my eyes. Basically, those are small intuitions, and in that spirit, they're kind of free of rumination, and they're also free of a lot of the stuff in that cartoon bubble, like good writing should sound like this or you know whatever. Now, when you had the intuition about stealing a purse, my guess is you were heavily under this sway of a cartoon bubble that was full of all kinds of concepts that were so endemic to

you that you may didn't even notice them. I think you'd make the argument that that was either well, that it wasn't your deepest intuition because it was clouded by that that I don't really know, you know, but something like that. But I think the beauty of writing is that you're asking the intuition to do a very small thing, which is to have an opinion on a phrase. You know, it's not it's not giving you a world view, it's just giving you. So maybe it's like training wheels they

can do that much. You know. That's a great way to say it. And I liked what you said a minute ago to about recognizing the limits, you know, when you're doing a study, here the limits of the study. You know. I've been talking with some clients about this, you know, trusting yourself, And I said, well, I think I trust myself, and I trust myself that if I need to make a big decision that I'm going to

go get input and feedback from wise people. Now I'm not going to necessarily take whatever they say, but I trust myself enough. I've got a method of gathering information and filtering and thinking through it that I'll arrive at the right answer. It's not that I trust that out of my being immediately emerges the right answer. I love what you're saying there, that intuition being these small micro movements. Yeah, and at leads to another thing that I talked about

in the book, which is iteration. So in writing, I trust my intuition on Thursday, knowing that I get another shot at it on Friday, and I'm not disavowing my Thursday reaction. I'm just building on it. So in the same way, you know, I think we can act on our intuition with positive intentions, good faith. If we fuck it up, that's part of a story too, And it doesn't mean you're a terrible person. It doesn't mean you

can't trust your intuition. It's just part of the process, the long term process of trusting your your intuition, which gives you a chance after a chance, to hone it and to improve it. Otherwise it's too much like Russian roulette, you know. But if you say, yeah, I'm gonna take my best shot at it and forgive myself if I screw it up, And in writing, that's enacted literally by just showing up the next day and reading it once more and going, oh, yeah, I got that right. Oops,

that's not it. So I think the big lesson for a writer is that you learn that you're not you're writing. You're also not any one of those writers. You're all of those writers, all of the twenty writers that went into writing a six page story. You've been all of those and none of them are binding. You know. That's a beautiful lesson, and it means that you're never any one person. You're just an evolving series of people. And that to me gives me a lot of hope, because

otherwise it's too severe. You know, if I'm stuck, if I'm really just one identity, I've already messed that up. And I think that is a absolutely beautiful play to wrap up. Couldn't say it better. So, George, thank you so much. You and I are going to continue in the post show conversation where we're going to talk about what you get out of reading and kind of what

literature does for you listeners. If you'd like access to that other post show conversations, add free episodes, and lots of other great parts of being in our community, go to One you Feed dot net slash joint. George, thank you so much. I've been so excited for this one and it's been really fun. It's been really fun for me too. Eric. Thank you for having man. Thank you for your beautiful mind. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to

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